<?php

/*
 * This file is part of the Symfony package.
 *
 * (c) Fabien Potencier <fabien@symfony.com>
 *
 * For the full copyright and license information, please view the LICENSE
 * file that was distributed with this source code.
 */

namespace Symfony\Component\Security\Core\User;

/**
 * Represents the interface that all user classes must implement.
 *
 * This interface is useful because the authentication layer can deal with
 * the object through its lifecycle, using the object to get the encoded
 * password (for checking against a submitted password), assigning roles
 * and so on.
 *
 * Regardless of how your user are loaded or where they come from (a database,
 * configuration, web service, etc), you will have a class that implements
 * this interface. Objects that implement this interface are created and
 * loaded by different objects that implement UserProviderInterface
 *
 * @see UserProviderInterface
 * @see AdvancedUserInterface
 *
 * @author Fabien Potencier <fabien@symfony.com>
 */
interface UserInterface
{
    /**
     * Returns the roles granted to the user.
     *
     * <code>
     * public function getRoles()
     * {
     *     return array('ROLE_USER');
     * }
     * </code>
     *
     * Alternatively, the roles might be stored on a ``roles`` property,
     * and populated in any number of different ways when the user object
     * is created.
     *
     * @return Role[] The user roles
     */
    public function getRoles();

    /**
     * Returns the password used to authenticate the user.
     *
     * This should be the encoded password. On authentication, a plain-text
     * password will be salted, encoded, and then compared to this value.
     *
     * @return string The password
     */
    public function getPassword();

    /**
     * Returns the salt that was originally used to encode the password.
     *
     * This can return null if the password was not encoded using a salt.
     *
     * @return string The salt
     */
    public function getSalt();

    /**
     * Returns the username used to authenticate the user.
     *
     * @return string The username
     */
    public function getUsername();

    /**
     * Removes sensitive data from the user.
     *
     * This is important if, at any given point, sensitive information like
     * the plain-text password is stored on this object.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function eraseCredentials();
}
